Welcome to Sarajevo

What good can a journalist do in a world full of evil? Bring the evil to light, certainly, and expose the malefactors, if not to justice, then to the opprobrium of the public. All right, and then what?

The early-’90s slaughter of Bosnians (most of them Muslims) by Serbs (most of them Christian) was the first fully televised holocaust. Viewers watched, were horrified and flicked the channel to Cheers; European and American leaders watched, were horrified and did next to nothing. In Michael Winterbottom’s fiction film with a documentary feel, a British reporter (Stephen Dillane), a veteran eyewitness to many such atrocities, determines to adopt a Bosnian child. It seems one of the two options available to reporters at war: a kind gesture or, more futile but more therapeutic, a scream.